The wrong tool every night

A woman in Tanta sells crochet toys online. Orders arrive as chat messages. Every night she scrolls back through the day, copies each name, address and colour into a paper book, then types it all out again for the courier. It takes her two hours. About once a week a colour goes wrong or an address is missing a building number.

She is skilled at her craft and patient with her customers. The problem is not effort. It is the tool.

Anyone who makes things by hand knows this. The right tool saves time, saves money and keeps your fingers whole. The wrong one turns a ten-minute job into an evening and makes you feel clumsy at something you are good at.

Online, most of us work with tools we never really chose. The one that came with the phone. The one a friend showed us years ago. The one built to suit the company that made it rather than the person using it.

So we wrestle with them, and we blame ourselves.

There is almost certainly a simpler way for her to take orders: one page where the customer types her own address and picks the colour from a list. Finding it would cost an afternoon of asking around and fiddling. It would give back two hours every night for years.

That is the trade on offer. One afternoon of being a beginner again, in return for every evening after it.